Sunday, 15 March 2009

The Easter Path has now been up for about 2 weeks and people are beginning to use it and comment about it. A number of church groups have been in touch to ask for further details so they can take their own group round and last week we ran our first guided tour.

The thing that surprised me about walking the path in a group is how much attention you get from everyone else around at that time. Our walk started at 5pm on a Sunday so it wasn't massively busy but even so people stopped to see what we were doing as we gathered around each window for a short reflection.

We think of spiritual practice as something which is quite closed and conducted in a safe environment but going out on the streets like this invites public attention which alters the experience. There is also something quite different about being meditative in a public environment from the kind of public evangelising you sometimes come across in town centres. It felt to me more respectful for a group of people to be standing in the street in silence meditating than trying to engage with passers by in some way.

Jesus walk to Golgotha was a very public event that had no exposition to it, it just happened and people were left to draw their own conclusions about what was going on. The message of Easter is more powerful if we just find ways to tell people the story and let them interpret and understand it for themselves.

The next guided walk is 29th March at 5pm starting at Brighthelm and it takes a little over an hour and a half.